Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

EVENTS

Dean: Pastors Loved Godly Constitution

Bradlee Dean’s latest missive from Planet Wingnuttia quotes several Christian pastors praising the Constitution and claiming that it was a Christian document, thus proving Dean’s contention that the Constitution was passed to George Washington by Jesus himself at the foot of Mt. Sinai.

What a contrast to the preachers who thundered from America’s pulpits before, during and after the Revolutionary War, causing the colonists to stand up in the face of tyranny. The British labeled them as the much-feared “Black Robed Regiment.” The British were not the only ones who recognized them as the bulwarks of America’s Independence:

“Mighty men they were, of iron nerve and strong hand and unblanched cheek and heart of flame. God needed not reeds shaken by the wind, not men clothed in soft raiment [Matthew 11:7-8], but heroes of hardihood and lofty courage. … And such were the sons of the mighty who responded to the Divine call.”

– Bishop Charles Galloway, 1898

“The ministers of the Revolution were, like their Puritan predecessors, bold and fearless in the cause of their country. No class of men contributed more to carry forward the Revolution and to achieve our independence than did the ministers. … [B]y their prayers, patriotic sermons, and services [they] rendered the highest assistance to the civil government, the army, and the country.”

– Historian B. F. Morris, 1864

“The Constitutional Convention and the written Constitution were the children of the pulpit.”
– Historian Alice Baldwin, 1918

Well yes, some ministers in the colonies were certainly behind the revolution. But when it came time to write the Constitution, the religious right of that day pretty much freaked out over that document, claiming that it would bring down the wrath of God on us all because it did not contain any language about our fealty to Him. Isaac Kramnick and Laurence Moore cite many such sermons and pamphlets from 1787 and 1788, during the writing and ratification of the Constitution:

In Philadelphia the principles of Virginia and New York were written into the new federal Constitution “without much debate,” reflecting perhaps the towering influence Madison and Hamilton had at the Constitutional Convention. New York’s Hamilton had, in fact, earlier given Virginia’s Madison his draft for a constitution, which included the clause “nor shall any religious test for any office or place, be ever established by law.” As for Madison’s views in 1787 on religion and politics, we have the evidence of his contributions to the Federalist papers, written by him, Hamilton, and John Jay in 1787 and 1788 to persuade New York state delegates to ratify the Constitution at their convention. These essays fail to mention God anywhere. (Newt Gingrich, so convinced that the Federalist papers are the final word on American politics that he urged all the members of the House of Representatives to read them when he became Speaker, must realize that nowhere do they discuss America as a Christian people with a Christian government.) Indeed, the one extended reference in the Federalist papers to religion, written by Madison, totally undercuts its value as a govemmental means to promote civic virtue. In the famous Federalist No. 10 Madison argues that zealous pursuit of religious opinions, far from leading men to “cooperate for their common good,” causes them to hate each other and disposes them “to vex and oppress each other.”

If there was little debate in Philadelphia over the “no religious test” clause, a veritable firestorm broke out in the country at large during the ratification conventions in each of the states. Outraged Protestants attacked what they saw, correctly, as a godless Constitution. The “no religious test” clause was perceived by many to be the gravest defect of the Constitution. Colonel Jones, a Massachusetts delegate, told the state’s ratifying convention that American political leaders had to believe in God and Jesus Christ. Amos Singletary, another delegate to the Massachusetts ratification convention, was upset at the Constitution’s not requiring men in power to be religious “and though he hoped to see Christians [in office], yet by the Constitution, a papist, or an infidel was as eligible as they.” In New Hampshire the fear was of “a papist, a Mohomatan [sic], a deist, yea an atheist at the helm of government.” Henry Abbot, a delegate to the North Carolina convention, wamed that “the exclusion of religious tests” was “dangerous and impolitic” and that “pagans, deists, and Mahometans [sic] might obtain offices among us.” If there is no religious test, he asked, “to whom will they [officeholders] swear support-the ancient pagan gods of jupiter, Juno, Minerva, or Pluto?”

More specific fears were clearly at work here. The absence of religious tests, it was feared, would open up the national government to control by Jews, Catholics, and Quakers. The Reverend David Caldwell, a Presbyterian minister and delegate in North Carolina, worried that the Constitution now offered an invitation to “Jews and pagans of every kind” to govern us. Major Thomas Lusk, a delegate in Massachusetts, denounced Article 6 of the Constitution and shuddered “at the idea that Roman Catholics, Papists, and Pagans might be introduced into office, and that Popery and the Inquisition may be established in America.” A delegate in North Carolina waved a pamphlet that depicted the possibility that the pope of Rome might be elected president. Calming himself down, he warned the delegates that in “the course of four or five hundred years” it was most certain that “Papists may occupy that [presidential] chair.” More realistically, it was fear of Quakers, and of their pacifism and antislavery views, that helped fuel the debate. In Charleston, South Carolina, a writer in the City Gazette warned on January 3, 1788, that “as there will be no religious test,” the Quakers “will have weight, in proportion to their numbers, in the great scale of continental govemment.” An anticonstitutional article written for the New York Daily Advertiser that same January and widely reprinted within days in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts papers pulled no punches about the social repercussions of Article 6. No religious tests admitted to national lawmaking: “lst. Quakers, who will make the blacks saucy, and at the same time deprive us of the means of defence-2dly. Mahometans, who ridicule the doctrine of the Trinity-3dly. Deists, abominable wretches-4thly. Negroes, the seed of Cain -5thly Beggars, who when set on horseback will ride to the devil-6thly. Jews etc. etc.” Not quite finished with the last, the newspaper writer feared that since the Constitution stupidly gave command of the whole militia to the president, “should he hereafter be a]ew, our dear posterity may be ordered to rebuild Jerusalem.”

The prohibition of religious tests was seen by many opponents as the operative sign of the Constitutions more basic flaw-its general godless quality, its seeming indifference to religion. Diputants around America complained, as the writer “Philadelphiensis” did in November 1787, of the framers’ “silence” and “indifference about religion.” An anonymous writer in the Virginia Independent Chronicle cautioned in October 1787 about “the pernicious effects” of the Constitution’s “general disregard of religion,” its “cold indifference towards religion.” Thomas Wilson, also of Virginia, insisted that the “Constitution is de[i]stical in principle, and in all probability the composers had no thought of God in all their consultations.” There is some truth in Mr. Wilson’s observation. When Benjamin Franklin, who presided over the Constitutional Convention, urged the delegates to open their sessions with prayers, a request cited often today by the religious right, the delegates, more worried about worldly matters like Shays’s Rebellion and America’s financial instability under the Articles of Confederation, voted to adjourn for the day rather than discuss Franklin’s suggestion. The matter was never brought up again.

Deism was, as we shall see, a powerful force among the intellectuals of the founding generation, even among many of the delegates in Philadelphia. A nondoctrinaire religion, deism rejected a supernatural faith built around an anthropomorphic God who intervened in human affairs, either in answer to prayer or for other, inscrutable reasons. Instead, it posited a naturalistic religion with a God understood as a supreme intelligence who after creating the world destined it to operate forever after according to natural, rational, and scientific laws. No surprise, then, that a frequent claim heard in 1787 and 1788 was that the Constitution represented a deistic conspiracy to overthrow the Christian commonwealth. This view was most powerfully put by the Carlisle, Pennsylvania, pamphleteer “Aristocrotis” in a piece aptly titled “The Government of Nature Delineated or An Exact Picture of the New Federal Constitution.”

Aristocrotis contends that the delegates in Philadelphia have created a govemment that for the first time in world history removes religion from public life. Until 1787 “there was never a nation in the world whose govemment was not circumscribed by religion.” But this was no problem for the Constitutional Convention intent on creating “a govemment founded upon nature.” What, he asks, “is the world to the federal convention but as the drop of a bucket, or the small dust in the balance! What the world could not accomplish from the commencement of time till now, they easily performed in a few moments by declaring that ‘no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, under the United States? ” This, Aristocrotis suggests, “is laying the ax to the root of the tree; whereas other nations only lopped off a few noxious branches.” He argues that the “new Constitution, disdains . . . belief of a deity, the immortality of the soul, or the resurrection of the body, a day of judgement, or a future state of rewards and punishments,” because its authors are committed to a natural religion that is deistic nonreligion. He concludes with irony: “lf some religion must be had the religion of nature will certainly be preferred by a government founded upon the law of nature. One great argument in favor of this religion is, that most of the members of the grand convention are great admirers of it; and they certainly are the best models to form our religious as well as our civil belief on.”

Other critics of the Constitution shared Aristocrotis’ demand for the retention of a Christian commonwealth, with a similar desire to see religion be an integral part of public life. In New Hampshire, “A Friend to the Rights of the People,” writing against “the discarding of all religious tests,” asked in an interesting shift, “Will this be good policy to discard all religion?” The answer was, of course, no, for despite the Constitution “it is acknowledged by all that civil government can’t well be supported without the assistance of religion.” No man, he concluded, “is to to be a ruler of protestants, without he can honestly profess to be of the protestant religion.” During this same New Hampshire ratification debate, a delegate argued that to ratify the Constitution would be to overturn all religion and introduce a godless America, suggesting even that if the Constitution were adopted “congress might deprive the people ofthe use of the holy scriptures.”

An Anti-Federalist writer wamed in a Boston newspaper on January 10, 1788, that since God was absent from the Constitution, Americans would suffer the fate that the prophet Samuel foretold to Saul: “because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he hath also rejected thee.” In short, if Americans in their new fundamental law forgot God and His Christian commonwealth, God would soon forget them, and they would perish. The same apocalyptic theme was pidced up by the Massachusetts Anti-Federalist Charles Turner, who feared that “without the presence of Christian piety and morals the best Republican Constitution can never save us from slavery and ruin.”

One of the most moving rejections of the godless Constitution in favor of an overtly Christian government came from one “David” in the Massachussets Gazette on March 7, 1788. His message was clear. Public virtue and civic peace required governmental encouragement of and involvement with Christian religion. He defended Massachusetts’ “religious test, which requires all public officers to be of some Christian, protestant persuasion,” and criticized the federal Constitutions “public inattention” to religion and the framers’ “leaving religion to shift wholly for itself. ” The new nation was embarking on a futile course, for “it is more difficult to build an elegant house without tools to work with, than it is to establish a durable government without the publick protection of religion.”

A letter to the delegates at the Virginia ratifying convention in June 1788 urged them to insist on adding to the first or second article of the Constitution a clause requiring the creation “at every proper place through the United States” of academies regulated by Congress where young people would learn “the principles of the Christian religion without regard to any sect, but pure and unadultetated as left by its divine author and his apostle.” The social benefits expected to flow from these obligatory Christian academies sound very much like a 1788 version of the projected fruits of compulsory school prayer as urged by today`s Christian right. Were compulsory Christian education established, the Virginian affirms, “we would have Fewer law suits, less backbiting, slander, and mean observations, more industry, justice and real happiness than at present.”

Like this Virginian, those opposed to the godless Constitution did not just complain; their advocacy of a Chtistian commonwealth led them to propose specilic changes in the Constitution at various state ratifying conventions, all of which were rejected. In Connecticut, William Williams, a delegate, formally moved that the Constirution’s one-sentence preamble be enlarged to include a Christian conception of politics, He proposed that it be changed to read, “We the people of the United States in a firm belief of the being and perfection of the one living and true God, the creator and supreme Governor of the World, in His universal providence and the authority of His laws: that He will require of all moral agents an account of their conduct, that all rightful powers among men are ordained of, and mediately derived from God, therefore in a dependence on His blessing and acknowledgment of His efficient protection in establishing our Independence, whereby it is become necessary to agree upon and settle a Constitution of federal government for ourselves, and in order to form a more perfect union, etc., as it is expressed in the present introduction, do ordain, etc.” Williams also moved that a religious test along these lines be required for all federal officials. One hundred and sixty years later the Pledge of Allegiance might be changed by Congress to include the brief “under God.” But in 1788 the delegates in Connecticut chose not to introduce God, via Williams`s wordy resolution, into the U.S. Constitution.

Equally unsuccessful was the Virginia initiative in April and May 1788 to change the wording of Article 6 itself. “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office of public trust under the United States`° became “no other religious test shall ever be required than a belief in the one only true God, who is the rewarder of the good, and the punisher of the evil.” This change was rejected.

From the ratification conventions throughout the 1800s, attempts were made to add a “Christian nation” amendment to the Constitution and they all failed. Then suddenly, the Christian right changed tactics and decided that it was a Christian document all along.

Comments

As I see it, the constitutional delegates in the states were educated in the classics and could read Greek or Latin or both. They knew the proposed Constitution was godless because they actually read it. Today’s Christian Reich is at a disadvantage because they either cannot or will not read the Constitution.

I have just recently gotten around to reading The Federalist Papers on the Nook my wife got me for Christmas. So far I’m up to the low teens. The only one I’ve read so far that makes reference to religion in the way the Bartonites have in mind is Federalist 2, attributed to John Jay, which includes passages like:

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

Followed by:

This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.

It reads like an Intelligent Design theory of the United States.

There is also this quote I just found attributed to Jay from the Wikipedia page on him:

“Real Christians will abstain from violating the rights of others, and therefore will not provoke war. Almost all nations have peace or war at the will and pleasure of rulers whom they do not elect, and who are not always wise or virtuous. Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest, of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.”

If reality’s not on your side, what’s left but lies? For those that aren’t ignorant, it’s gotta suck. Can you imagine trying to argue with someone while thinking in the back of your mind, “Oh I am so totally full of shit…” That’s gotta be painful.

“Historian” B. F. Morris (Benjamin Franklin Morris [1810-1867]) quoted above was a clergyman who, while living in Washington, collected material (some of it unpublished) that tended to support what he called the “Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States Developed in the Official and Historical Annals of the Republic”–the title of his 1864 book. He transmitted such fake quotations as “It is impossible to govern the universe without God, and a fortiori, impossible to govern a nation without him” and “True religion affords to government its surest support” (both attributed to George Washington). David Barton employs his work.

“The ministers of the Revolution were, like their Puritan predecessors, bold and fearless in the cause of their country. No class of men contributed more to carry forward the Revolution and to achieve our independence than did the ministers. … [B]y their prayers, patriotic sermons, and services [they] rendered the highest assistance to the civil government, the army, and the country.”

Alverant, I never claimed they had legal standing. Since the Constitution makes no mention of it being a “Christian” document, the Christian Nation types like Barton have to then look at the writings of the supporters of the Constitution to make the argument that if they, like John Jay, for example, considered the US to be a Christian Nation, then the Constitution becomes a Christian document because its authors and supporters were informed by their religious beliefs. IOW, if the Founders took it for granted that the US was a Christian nation, then there was no need to specifically mention it in the Constitution because it was already understood. Sort of the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence line of thinking.

“lst. Quakers, who will make the blacks saucy, and at the same time deprive us of the means of defence-2dly. Mahometans, who ridicule the doctrine of the Trinity-3dly. Deists, abominable wretches-4thly. Negroes, the seed of Cain -5thly Beggars, who when set on horseback will ride to the devil-6thly. Jews etc. etc.”

Well Jefferson was a Deist of sorts, Nixon was a Quaker, although I can find no record of his making the blacks saucy, and Obama counts as Negro. That’s only three out of six, you guys ain’t trying. Maybe elect a beggar on horseback next.

““Oh I am so totally full of shit…” That’s gotta be painful.”
The xtians I’ve asked have copped to the position that the ends does justify the means so long as the end is sufficiently good. It’s not a hard position (full of cognitive stress) for lots of people.

One of the details that kills me about Barton (shared by Scalia) (both thought leaders on the right) is that for all their focus on history, they are plainly and factually wrong about how our founders felt. At the very least, they need to acknowledge that the constitution was a compromise and that the folks back then had a plurality of views.

Even if the framers had intended to make
America a Christian nation, it’s highly unlikely that they would have picked the evangelical brand of Christianity favored by people like Barton and Dean. Evangelicals were such a small fraction of the population back then. The framers would have been more likely to pick the Anglican Church or Congregationalism as the official brand.

While I find trying to understand what the Founders ™ intended with their Constitution, it is for a purely academic reasons. As far as deciding what to do about modern issues, I could not care less what the Founders intended. They were rich white men living more than two hundred years ago. They did not live in this world. We do.

They did give us a document that was flexible enough that we have a functional (well, almost) government that is good enough to be going on with and have only amended it 27 times since it was ratified (admittedly, I would love to see a couple more amendments).

I think the passion for the Founder’s ™ intent is based on a generalized authoritarian attitude but is more specifically based on the fairy tale that Things Were Better In The Olden Days.

respectively. Sounds like he can’t find any ministers pushing hard for the constitution, so he’s quoting people 80 years or more later saying that ministers were morale boosters during a military conflict that preceded any drafting of the Constitution by a dozen years? Why not quote the ministers on the Articles of Confederation and the Whiskey Rebellion?

As for the “ministers of the revolution” kicked ass comment, well, they are the ministers of a war time country saying kick the ass of the bad guy. They weren’t the ministers of the 3rd Amendment, now, were they?

And what was the official position of the churches on Article 1, section 8? Did they really ram that one through? God wanted something as certain as himself, so “Go Go Puritan Pen!” or maybe, “ministers, Ministers, MINISTERS – Hooooooooooooooo!”

Jews etc. etc.” Not quite finished with the last, the newspaper writer feared that since the Constitution stupidly gave command of the whole militia to the president, “should he hereafter be a]ew, our dear posterity may be ordered to rebuild Jerusalem.”